People around the world are seeing fewer and fewer stars in the night sky. The change in star visibility can be explained by an increase in the sky brightness of 7-10 percent per year. The rate of change is faster than satellite measurements of artificial light emissions on Earth would at first suggest. This is the finding of a study published in the journal Science, conducted by a research group led by Christopher Kyba of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences and the Ruhr-Universität Bochum with colleagues from the GFZ and the US National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab....

A new study has found an association between low average levels of vitamin D and high numbers of COVID-19 cases and mortality rates across 20 European countries. The research, led by Dr. Lee Smith of Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) and Mr. Petre Cristian Ilie, lead urologist of Queen Elizabeth Hospital King’s Lynn NHS Foundation Trust, is published in the journal Aging Clinical and Experimental Research. Previous observational studies have reported an association between low levels of vitamin D and susceptibility to acute respiratory tract infections....

A new study using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has shown that most very bright high-mass stars, which drive the evolution of galaxies, do not live alone. Almost three-quarters of these stars are found to have a close companion star, far more than previously thought. Surprisingly most of these pairs are also experiencing disruptive interactions, such as mass transfer from one star to the other, and about one-third are even expected to ultimately merge to form a single star....

NASA experts will discuss and answer public questions about Comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE during a broadcast of NASA Science Live and follow up media teleconference on Wednesday, July 15. The comet is visible with the naked eye in the early morning sky and starting this week, after sunset. The NASA Science Live episode will air live at 3 p.m. EDT (12 p.m. PDT) Wednesday on NASA Television and the agency’s website, along with Facebook Live, YouTube, Periscope, LinkedIn, Twitch, and USTREAM....

A new scientific study shows that sleep medications increase the risk of dementia in whites. But the type and quantity of the medication may be factors in explaining the higher risk. It follows previous work that shows blacks have a higher likelihood than whites of developing Alzheimer’s, the most common type of dementia, and that they have different risk factors and disease manifestation. The final corrected draft of the study was recently published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease....

NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft, standing atop the mobile launcher, are photographed at Launch Pad 39B at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on March 18, 2022. The Artemis I stack was carried from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the pad – a 4.2-mile journey that took nearly 11 hours to complete – by the agency’s crawler-transporter 2 for a wet dress rehearsal ahead of the uncrewed launch....

COVID-19 is primarily transmitted through the inhalation of virus-laden aerosols and respiratory droplets that infected individuals expel by coughing, sneezing, speaking, or breathing. Researchers have used active air sampling devices to detect airborne SARS-CoV-2 in indoor settings; however, these monitors are typically large, expensive, non-portable, and require electricity. To better understand personal exposures to the virus, Krystal Pollitt and colleagues wanted to develop a small, lightweight, inexpensive, and wearable device that doesn’t require a power source....

In parts of the Earth that are very sparsely populated, such as the Antarctic, direct observational weather data can be hard to come by, and with Antarctica’s extreme climate, failure to accurately predict severe weather can easily become deadly. The team conducted a study that focused on the impacts of these data on forecasting an extreme cyclonic event, and the findings have been accepted and published as early view in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences....

Recently, an international research team reported discovering fossil footprints for animal appendages in the Ediacaran Period (about 635-541 million years ago) in China. This is considered the earliest animal fossil footprint record. The research was published in Science Advances on June 6, 2018. Bilaterian animals such as arthropods and annelids have paired appendages and are among the most diverse animals today and in the geological past. They are often assumed to have appeared and radiated suddenly during the “Cambrian Explosion” about 541-510 million years ago, although it has long been suspected that their evolutionary ancestry was rooted in the Ediacaran Period....

The scientists reported their findings in the journal Lancet Infectious Disease. This is the first time that scientists have sequenced pathogen genomes to actively control an ongoing outbreak, with positive results. After three infants tested positive for methicilin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), clinical microbiologist Sharon Peacock and her team got involved. The bacteria were isolated and were resistant to a nearly identical spectrum of antibiotics, indicating that they came from a common source....

As the world begins its large-scale transition toward low-carbon energy sources, it is vital that the pros and cons of each type are well understood and the environmental impacts of renewable energy, small as they may be in comparison to coal and gas, are considered. In two papers — published today in the journals Environmental Research Letters and Joule — Harvard University researchers find that the transition to wind or solar power in the U....

About 24% of U.S. adults have NAFLD, a chronic disease in which excess fat builds up in your liver. This buildup of fat is not caused by heavy alcohol use. NAFLD can progress to chronic liver damage and is associated with a higher risk of death. Diet and exercise are the standard of care for NAFLD as no medicines have been approved to treat the disease. “Our study results show that long or irregular menstrual cycles may be associated with an increased risk of developing NAFLD, and this link was not explained by obesity,” said Seungho Ryu, M....

Nagoya University scientists, in cooperation with Asahi Kasei Corporation, have succeeded in designing a laser diode that emits deep-ultraviolet light, according to research published in the journal Applied Physics Express. “Our laser diode emits the world’s shortest lasing wavelength, at 271.8 nanometers (nm), under pulsed [electric] current injection at room temperature,” says Professor Chiaki Sasaoka of Nagoya University’s Center for Integrated Research of Future Electronics. Previous efforts in the development of ultraviolet laser diodes had only managed to achieve emissions down to 336 nm, Sasaoka explains....

MIT researchers have built an augmented reality headset that gives the wearer X-ray vision. The headset combines computer vision and wireless perception to automatically locate a specific item that is hidden from view, perhaps inside a box or under a pile, and then guide the user to retrieve it. The system utilizes radio frequency (RF) signals, which can pass through common materials like cardboard boxes, plastic containers, or wooden dividers, to find hidden items that have been labeled with RFID tags, which reflect signals sent by an RF antenna....

“The social relationships in vampire bats that we have been observing in captivity are pretty robust to changes in the social and physical environment–even when our captive groups consist of a fairly random sample of bats from a wild colony,” said Simon Ripperger of the Museum für Naturkunde, Leibniz-Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science in Berlin. “When we released these bats back into their wild colony, they chose to associate with the same individuals that were their cooperation partners during their time in captivity....

Without top predators such as wolves and grizzly bears, smaller meat-eating animals like coyotes and foxes or grazers such as deer and elk can balloon in population, unchecked. This can initiate more deer-vehicle collisions, scavenging by urban coyotes and other unnatural human-animal interactions. University of Washington researchers have discovered that large predators play a key yet unexpected role in keeping smaller predators and deer in check. Their “fatal attraction” theory finds that smaller predators are drawn to the kill sites of large predators by the promise of leftover scraps, but the scavengers may be killed themselves if their larger kin returns for seconds....

The research, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, shows that turning to the oceans for food if land-based farming fails after a nuclear war is unlikely to be a successful strategy – at least in the equatorial Pacific. “In our computer simulations, we see a 40 percent reduction in phytoplankton (algae) biomass in the equatorial Pacific, which would likely have downstream effects on larger marine organisms that people eat,” said lead author Joshua Coupe, a post-doctoral research associate in the Department of Environmental Sciences in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University–New Brunswick....

In pioneering experiments at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, an international team of researchers used light to break open simple ring-structured molecules and explored their transformations using a powerful X-ray laser. The experiments prove the capabilities of a technique for studying certain types of fast-evolving molecular transformations at SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source, the world’s most powerful X-ray free-electron laser. Those transformations relate to conditions, known as non-Born-Oppenheimer dynamics, in which the motions of atomic centers, or nuclei, are coupled with the motions of their associated electrons....

A new study by Jake Socha, professor in biomedical engineering and mechanics in Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering, published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science journal, “Physiological Responses to Gravity in an Insect” shows that insects experience similar physiological effects of gravity. With Jon Harrison, professor of environmental physiology at Arizona State University, and undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students, Socha assessed the effect of gravity on insects and discovered an active response called functional compartmentalization....

A team led by Carnegie’s Scott S. Sheppard has found 20 new moons orbiting Saturn. This brings the ringed planet’s total number of moons to 82, surpassing Jupiter, which has 79. The discovery was announced Monday by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center. Each of the newly discovered moons is about five kilometers, or three miles, in diameter. Seventeen of them orbit the planet backward, or in a retrograde direction, meaning their movement is opposite of the planet’s rotation around its axis....